Wednesday, July 15, 2015

But certainly, he came more and more to be unable to care for, or think of soul but as in an actual body, or of any world but that wherein are water and trees, and where men and women look, so or so, and press actual hands. It was the trick even his pity learned, fastening those who suffered in anywise to his affections by a kind of sensible attachments. He would think of Julian, fallen into incurable sickness, as spoiled in the sweet blossom of his skin like pale amber, and his honey-like hair; of Cecil, early dead, as cut off from the lilies, from golden summer days, from women’s voices; and then what comforted him a little was the thought of the turning of the child’s flesh to violets in the turf above him.

- The Child in the House In: Selected Writings of Walter Pater, Ed. Harold Bloom, Columbia University Press 1974

Monday, September 15, 2014

It was so utterly wonderful to find I could go so heartily & headily mad; for you know I had been priding myself on my peculiar sanity! And it was more wonderful yet to find the madness made up into things so dreadful, out of things so trivial. One of the most provoking and disagreeable spectres was developed out of the firelight on my mahogany bedpost - and my fate, for all futurity, seemed continually to turn on the humor of dark personages who were materially nothing but stains of damp on the ceiling. But the sorrowfullest part of the matter was, and is, that while my illness at Matlock encouraged me by all its dreams in after work, this one has done nothing but humiliate and terrify me; and leaves me nearly unable to speak any more except of the natures of stones and flowers.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

In Walser, an absolute sense of decency about language does not let agony express itself. The reality is made manifest, the fact of agony, not agony. It is necessary to speak of things, not of words. Marvelously, everything that is utterable is said when one simply states the case.

- Massimo Cacciari, Songs of the Departed in POSTHUMOUS PEOPLE. Vienna at the Turning Point. Stanford University Press, 1996

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Saturday, February 22, 2014

In 1883, an earthquake that lasted ninety seconds shook the south of Italy. In that earthquake, he lost his parents and his sister; he himself was buried by rubble. Two or three hours later, he was rescued. To ward off total despair, he resolved to think about the Universe - a general procedure among the unfortunate, and sometimes a balm.

Jorge Luis Borges - Benedetto Croce

Image - herbert pfostl rescue emblem

Friday, May 3, 2013

On the evening before that most important day of my life, in Würzburg, I went for a walk. When the sun went down, it seemed as though my happiness were sinking with it. I was horrified to think that I might be forced to part with everything, everything of importance to me. I was walking back to the city, lost in my own thoughts, through an arched gateway. Why, I asked myself, does this arch not collapse, since after all it has no support? It remains standing, I answered, because all the stones want to fall down at the same time - and from this thought I derived an indescribable heartening consolation, which stayed with me right up to the decisive moment: I too would not collapse, even if all my support were removed.Heinrich von Kleist, Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, November 16, 18, 1800Image: Ravenna, Kirche San Vitale. Geweiht 547, byzantinisch. Kapitell im Chor.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

At the age of ten he constructed a working model of a sewing machine out of bits of wood and wire.

It was not true that he couldn't hear, simply that he wouldn't listen.

He took The Brothers Karamazov to the front.

Continued to wear his uniform for many years after the war.

His sense of humor was "heavy".And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be - unutterably - contained in what has been uttered!I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.What we say will be easy, but to know why we say it will be very difficult.The solution of the problem of life is to be seen in the disappearance of the problem.The inexpressible (that which seems mysterious to me, geheimnisvoll, and that I am not capable of expressing) provides the ground upon which all that I am able to express acquires meaning.The sense of the world must lie outside the world.What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics.

A whole generation of disciples was able to take Wittgenstein for a positivist because he has something of enormous importance in common with the positivists: he draws the line between what we can speak about and what we must be silent about just as they do. The difference is only that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds - and this is its essence - that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about. (Paul Engelmann)

I ought to have done something positive with my life, to have become a star in the sky.

His last words were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."- Text and images from:Ludwig Wittgenstein The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir by Paul Engelmann

Saturday, March 9, 2013

I should like to erect here a modest stele to the memory of Sir Arthur Helps (1813-1875), a secretary and confidant of Queen Victoria. It was probably he who invented the marvelously useful verb to disinvent. The only illustration of this word in the Oxford English Dictionary (Vol. III) is a quotation from Helps dated 1868: "I would disinvent telegraphic communication." The word is not listed in Vol. I of the Supplement (1972), but a recent use will be found s.v. fantasy in the same volume. If I were younger, I would found the Coverers' and Disinventors' Club.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

The successive thump of logs on the paving of the courtyards. They were unloaded from carts, house by house, as the cold weather loomed. The wood fell on the ground and announced winter. Baudelaire stayed awake. There was no need of anything else but that sound - dull, repetitive. The sun already knows that soon it will be imprisoned "in its polar inferno." It is as if auscultating labored breathing: "Trembling. I listen to every log that falls."

Anatole France, with the amiable skepticism that sometimes prevented him from understanding, recounted that one day a sailor showed Baudelaire an African fetish, "a monstrous little head carved out of a piece of wood by a poor negro." It's really ugly, said the sailor. And he threw it away in scorn. "Watch out!" said Baudelaire anxiously. "It might be the one true god!" It was his firmest declaration of faith.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Your letter has drawn me from the solitude in which I had shut myself up for nearly nine months, and from which I found it hard to stir. You will not guess what I have been about. I will tell you for such things do not happen every day. I have been making a list of from two to three hundred radical words of the Russian language, and have had them translated into as many languages and jargons as I could find. Their number exceeds already the second hundred. Every day I took one of these words and wrote it out in all the languages which I could collect. This has taught me that Celtic is like the Ostiakian: that what means sky in one language means cloud, fog, vault, in others; that the word God in certain dialects means Good, the Highest, in others, sun or fire...I asked Professor Pallas to come to me, and after making an honest confession of my sin, we agreed to publish these collections, and thus make them useful to those who like to occupy themselves with the forsaken toys of others.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

There on the pier, stabbed by an ice pick, the Empress Elizabeth, symbol of the oldest European monarchy, which must die at the villainous hand. The contemptible Lucheni raved about making noise and killing someone in the public eye. But it was really the enduring vagabond melancholy of Elizabeth Wittelsbach that, in the mysterious dialogue of souls, summoned the madman to Geneva from Piedmont and anointed him as her assassin. For that matter, even the Italian government was a Lucheni. (Perhaps in its death wish, Vienna itself summoned him.)

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

I have read now quickly, now slowly through the whole of your wonderful book.

What at first would appear to be an Ars MorendiSuddenly shifts into alternative contemplationsOn history, literature, religion:All products of the Self.

The resonance is of one who, because of age,Contemplates his own mortalityAnd tries to persuade himselfThat though the end is the endLife is not pointless.

The art of book-making shines on every pageReflecting the author’s own claim to immortalityWith rare choices and artful placementOn beautiful paper softly radiating a luminous sepia.

- Glenn Watkins on To Die No More

Glenn Watkins is the coeditor of the complete works of Gesualdo and author of Gesualdo: The Man and His Music (1973) and The Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth and Memory (2010). He is also the author of Soundings: Music in the 20th Century (1988); Pyramids at the Louvre (1994); and Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (2003).

Monday, April 25, 2011

If one of those little flakes of micasand, hurried in tremulous spangling along the bottom of the ancient river, too light to sink, too faint to float, almost too small for sight, could have had a mind given to it as it was at last borne down with its kindred dust into the abysses of the stream, and laid, (would it not have thought?) for a hopeless eternity, in the dark ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all earth's atoms; incapable of any use or change; not fit, down there in the diluvial darkness, so much as to help an earth-wasp to build its nest, or feed the first fibre of a lichen; — what would it have thought, had it been told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it, with its fellows, the axe of God should hew that Alpine tower; that against it—poor, helpless, mica flake! — the wild north winds should rage in vain; beneath it— low-fallen mica flake —the snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded blue; and around it—weak, wave-drifted mica flake! — the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its abiding place on the imperishable spire?

To Die No More

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To Die No Moreis an artist's book about the marvelous embroideries of death taken from many sources both known and long forgotten.170 fragments - from Aries to Wittgenstein - collected and edited by Herbert Pfostl and Kristofor Minta with splintersby Kristofor Minta, ruins, appropriated by James Walsh, and small paintings of shipwrecks,animals, and ashes by Herbert Pfostl.Made with great care and sober like a good dream.Dedicated to the deeply dead and the truly living.2oo pages text - 25 color images$25.00

pony credo

An idea of books from a yearningto counter the all-polluting imagery-machineswith parables of plants and animalsand old storiesof black robbers and white stags.Fragments on death like mirrorsfrom a black sleepin the forests of fairy tales.All stories from the dust of the deadin fragments and footnoteslike melodies of heartbreakand north and night and exploration–breakdowns.About saints with no promise of heavenand lost sailors forgottenand the terribly lonely bears.The unknown, the ugly – and the odd.Collected grand mistakes,noble errors from many sources.Sinking signals - conscious or not – sonatas and last lettersand great insults.The impossible tears in landscapesof ocean or stranded whales.A going far back to coalsand cruelties and sobbinglike songs in whiskey and blood.Of soldiers’ last letters and all seven seas.With pirates and wars and prayers in holes in the ground.Of fallen women and orphaned childrenand drowned slaves and burned saints.To make songs from doubtand books to live by.